NCAR Strategic Plan (1-17-14 review draft)
Introduction
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a national institution and resource dedicated to the study of the atmosphere, the Earth system, and the Sun. Our primary responsibility is to the broad goals and objectives of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), our principal sponsor (ref AGS plan, 2014). As an NSF Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC), we share NSF’s overarching goals of helping the United States uphold a position of world leadership in science and technology; promoting the transfer of new knowledge to society; and contributing to excellence in science and technology education.
This strategic plan will be used to steer the organization's direction over the next five years. It outlines the development and execution of an innovative, compelling and ambitious research program, emphasizing leadership in the development and operation of observational and computational facilities, the aggressive pursuit of key integrative scientific challenges that require the long-term commitment appropriate for a national center, and the development of the human capital needed to achieve such aims. Objectives will be achieved by working in a close, synergistic relationship with the academic community and by retaining and developing a world-class staff of scientists and engineers. This plan will thus guide NCAR priorities, focus energy and resources, and ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals consistent with the missions of NCAR and NSF.
NCAR staff and many other stakeholders, including members of the university science community and program officers of the NSF and other federal agencies, contributed to the development of this plan. Wide involvement in NCAR planning is essential because our work is collaborative and the successful implementation of it depends critically on close and ongoing engagement with a wide variety of partners.
The Uniqueness of NCAR
The atmospheric and related sciences are of critical importance, especially with rapidly changing environmental conditions and growing societal needs for relevant information and services.The hazards of long-term atmospheric and climate changes, air pollution episodes, sudden extreme weather, space storms, and secondary impacts such as drought, storm surge and wildfires take a significant toll in terms of human life and economic loss. During 2012, weather and climate disasters cost the United States more than $110 billion in damages and led to 377 fatalities. Poor air quality is estimated to result in more than 3 million deaths per year worldwide. Global greenhouse gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate, the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are warming, and the impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems are becoming more extensive. Ice melt in the Arctic and Greenland is outpacing the forecasts of today’s best models, and forecasts of the probabilities of changes in temperature, precipitation, and water availability are not yet at the fine spatial scale for effective use in regional adaptation and mitigation planning. Skill in predicting space-weather is currently not yet adequate for safeguarding radio communications, satellite-based navigation systems, and the power grid. Many important aspects of the interactions of societal change and environmental change remain poorly characterized.
Continued advancement in the atmospheric and related sciences, improvement in predictive capabilities, and more effective application of these advances to societal needs is, therefore, more important than ever. NCAR has an exceptional record of leadership and scientific achievement, and it has effectively translated scientific advances into useful knowledge for society. Weather, space weather, air quality, and climate change research are historical strengths of NCAR, and must remain so over the next five years and beyond. NCAR’s role is to bring relevant and objective information to national and international decisions on mitigation, adaptation, resiliency and sustainability. NCAR must also embrace a leadership role and actively engage with community leaders, research agencies, professional organizations, policy makers and others to convey significant research findings and emphasize the importance of investment in research and major facility development.
NCAR is unique in possessing the broad range and depth of scientific disciplines, expertise and facilities required to mount an end-to-end attack on some of today’s most significant environmental problems and interrelated issues. Moreover, through its close ties to the university community and the role it plays as a crossroads for the exchange of ideas, NCAR will continue to think big, bring the best minds to the table for large-scale, sustained and highly collaborative research efforts, and emphasize active engagement with the stakeholders and consumers of its science.
NCAR has been recognized for unique and innovative approaches to science, such as the development of freely available community models and associated support services. NCAR also possesses great strengths in observational science and computational facilities, and prides itself on sustaining research and facilities for the long haul, which is required to tackle difficult and important research challenges and develop solutions and highly valued services to the NSF community.
The Path Forward
With world-class observational and computing facilities and community models, NCAR and its university partners are in an exceptional position to address the most-pressing, grand challenge problems in Sun-Earth system science. This strategic plan focuses on two: improved understanding and prediction of: (1) weather hazards (including atmospheric, chemical and space weather) and their impacts on ecosystems, people, and society; and (2) the diverse and potentially disruptive consequences of natural and anthropogenic climate change on regional scales. The latter includes the impacts of climate change on the water cycle, water availability, weather extremes, the health and functioning of marine and terrestrial ecosystems, the potential for abrupt changes in climate, and understanding how society will respond to and feedback on climate change. These challenges are not new, but are being continually reshaped by the broadening realization of their significant impact on society.
At the heart of these challenges is our ability to observe and understand the complex Earth system, including forcings from the Sun and human systems. This knowledge must be encapsulated in dynamical models that provide increasingly skillful capabilities for predictions of changes in weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and space weather. A tension exists, however, between different directions for progress in modeling. Specifically, should resources be allocated and research efforts be extended to increase model resolution, or is it best to increase model complexity? The answer to this question should be problem-driven. Sea level rise and climate change impacts on water resources, for instance, are of great societal relevance and require increased model complexity (e.g., ice-sheet dynamics and land-surface hydrology). Progress is likely through the addition of new model capabilities, a strategic direction that has led to the development and release of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) – the continued development and support of which will remain a research and service priority for NCAR.
Improved model skill in predicting and attributing atmospheric and space weather hazards, as well as future regional changes in temperature and precipitation, however, will also require significant increases in model resolution. The development of models that run efficiently and accurately at a variety of horizontal resolutions – from the coarse resolutions required for millennial paleoclimate simulations to the highest resolutions required to resolve convective-scale weather and urban domains – will be a major focus for NCAR over the next decade.
Currently, regional weather and climate models use high resolution over regions of interest, with boundary forcing from lower-resolution global models, but this methodology has inherent problems. An improved method is to use a global model with targeted, high-resolution grids for both regional downscaling and upscaling of information fromlocal events. Both the global CESM and the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) are moving in this direction, by utilizing variable-mesh grids. These next-generation community-supported modeling systems will also necessitate the development of “scalable” physical parameterizations and numerical algorithms (NRC 2012), as well as new techniques for modeling and coupling socio-ecological systems, human activities and decision-making with the biophysical components of the Earth system. They will form the basis for prediction systems that produce representative probabilistic forecasts from minutes to decades and provide societally relevant information across multiple spatial scales. Additionally, the development of predictive systems that more effectively address societal needs will necessarily involve decision makers and other users of predictive information in the definition and design of simulation experiments and related research projects. A strategic focus on the development and application of multi-scale simulation and prediction systems will also provide important opportunities for much stronger collaboration between the weather and climate modeling communities, both within NCAR and with the broader community.
A particular strength of NCAR is that cutting-edge observational and modeling facilities reside side-by-side, with routine interaction between scientists and engineers working in both programs. Observations are essential in order to validate models and attain the requisite process understanding to develop improved model parameterizations. The development and deployment of new observing systems, and the effective utilization of existing data from completed field campaigns, will thus be an important component of this effort, including observing systems targeted at important under-sampled phenomena, such as hurricanes and other severe storms over ocean areas. New observations are also needed to better understand and predict solar storms as well as to increase scientific knowledge about complex, poorly understood social and behavioral processes of the human system at multiple scales. A closer integration of data assimilation techniques and statistics with model development and verification is needed not only to generate initial conditions, but also to facilitate analysis of sensitivity and uncertainty, and assess the incremental benefit of new observations.
New multi-scale simulation systems will push the modeling scale and complexity beyond the limits of current software engineering, data analytics and computer science capabilities. Achieving good node performance, scalability, and fault tolerance on trans-petascale to exascale computers will necessitate new algorithms and revision of existing model designs. In addition, the number and computational cost of the application components will increase dramatically. This will require the development of radically new software test and optimization approaches and new model validation strategies. The resultant large increase in model output will require new approaches for data storage and analysis.
Developing new capabilities for extracting useful information from “Big Data” – large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets – will be integral to this new strategic focus. Datasets that are impractical to deal with because they are either too large or too complex are a growing problem for the atmospheric and Earth science community, as they are rapidly outstripping the capabilities of current analysis tools and workflow practices and threaten to become a significant barrier to scientific progress in our field. Bringing together large numbers of disparate observational and model datasets, and enhancing data publication and discovery by promoting data publication as a first-class scientific activity, will be critical to the development, validation and application of the next-generation multi-scale simulation systems. Addressing this challenge will require close collaboration with external agencies and data archives to standardize metadata and promote transparent data discovery, access, analysis, legacy, preservation and stewardship. NCAR will thus work toward an integrated, next-generation portfolio of “Big Data” services that exploit a shared security infrastructure. This data delivery environment will need to be developed in collaboration with those created by our research peers, so that our services can be externally federated and provide our research community with even greater assets.
NCAR Imperatives
The path forward will be organized within the framework of six “imperatives” – those ongoing efforts and activities that are essential to our role as a national research center and that form the foundation for our attack on the grand challenges noted above. By their nature, the imperatives are roughly equal in importance.
NCAR Imperatives
1. Conduct innovative fundamental research to advance the atmospheric and related sciences
NCAR is deeply engaged in the identification of new scientific frontiers and the development, evaluation, and sharing of new approaches, methods, and tools. This process is important for accelerating scientific progress and improving the efficiency of the research enterprise in getting the most out of constrained resources. We foster a culture of experimentation and encourage cross-disciplinary discovery through sustained interaction of our staff and scientists with the broader research community to discuss emerging issues and opportunities. This includes an emphasis on periodic gatherings of students, early career scientists, and more senior researchers. Since we are engaged at the intersection of exciting scientific opportunity and important societal needs, we value and support regular interactions with a wide range of non-scientific audiences. We are facilitating connections between the scientific community and public and private sector decision-makers who benefit from new scientific insights by increasing the involvement of stakeholders in the definition of scientific problems and in the planning and evaluation of our scientific efforts.
Scientifically, there are many unanswered questions about the processes and interactions, both natural and human, which determine weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, space weather and their predictability. For example, predicting changes in weather and climate over the coming decades depends on understanding the components of the land-atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere-human system and their interactions, particularly those that regulate the cycling of water and carbon. Similarly, quantifying the role of solar variability in space and Earth climate requires analyses from the Sun's interior to the Earth's surface. Connecting research on the atmospheric chemistry-climate processes and research on climate impacts on human health are other examples of complex problems being addressed. Progress in each case requires an integrative approach involving a mix of theory, observations and models, and an understanding of the coupling between human and natural systems.
Our priorities in these areas are to:
· Create an environment that enables creative exploration across the scope of NCAR science, including discovery-oriented research into key components of the Sun-Earth-human system in order to understand fundamental processes and mechanisms
· Study the nature of couplings and feedbacks among the different components of the Sun-Earth-human system and integrate knowledge of processes and their interactions to better understand and predict the behavior of the system